Are the Wi-Fi-anxious away with the fairies?

I recently wrote that Sir William Stewart should investigate the dangers of Wi-Fi. I now retract that, and instead nominate that famous debunker of pseudoscience, James Randi. Both are poor substitutes for the late Dan Wilson, however.

Wilson was a friend of mine, a Post Office engineer from the old days, and a professional dowser. He began his dowsing career by diagnosing faults in switch-gear by laying his hands on the equipment. The more I study the arguments of those who claim they can detect harmful wireless signals, the more I’m reminded of my dowsing chum.

The problem with resolving this issue is that – to paraphrase a certain Donald Rumsfeld – we don’t always know what we know. We have evidence that, consciously, we haven’t integrated into our awareness, and so we discount it. We think we don’t know something.

The whole point of double-blind tests, where both the “electro-sensitive” subject and the tester are in complete ignorance of whether the WLAN is on or off, is entirely predicated on this concept of subconscious awareness. If you allow the tester to operate the “on-off” switch, the subject typically scores much, much better than if the tester simply presses a button marked “start test” and someone out of sight actually operates the machine.

My friend Dan claimed to be able to preserve milk. He imposed his will on his fridge, and told the bacteria in the milk not to multiply. A double-blind test was set up: he failed, spectacularly. Sadly, he died shortly afterwards, having resolved to cure his inoperable cancer by similar mental influence.

Dan had no time at all for Randi, who is very good at setting up tests that totally eliminate any channel for awareness to filter through to the subconscious. My bet is that a Randi-managed Wi-Fi radiation sensitivity test would expose a very large number of these electro-sensitive people as simply anxious.

If anybody was left after that, we’d be able to find out whether there are, after all, ways of detecting a Wi-Fi signal with your head. And I would really, really like to know if that is the case – but as long as the dowsing mentality dominates, we are never going to find out, are we?